Part 1 (1/2)
The Lowest Rung.
by Mary Cholmondeley.
PREFACE
I have been writing books for five-and-twenty years, novels of which I believe myself to be the author, in spite of the fact that I have been a.s.sured over and over again that they are not my own work. When I have on several occasions ventured to claim them, I have seldom been believed, which seems the more odd as, when others have claimed them, they have been believed at once. Before I put my name to them they were invariably considered to be, and reviewed as, the work of a man; and for years after I had put my name to them various men have been mentioned to me as the real author.
I remember once, when I was very young and shy, how at one of my first London dinner-parties a charming elderly man discussed one of my earliest books with such appreciation that I at last remarked that I had written it myself. If I had looked for a surprised flash of delight at the fact that so much talent was palpitating in white muslin beside him, I was doomed to be disappointed. He gravely and gently said, ”I know that to be untrue,” and the conversation was turned to other subjects.
One man did indeed actually announce himself to be the author of ”Red Pottage,” in the presence of a large number of people, including the late Mr. William Sharp, who related the occurrence to me. But the incident ended uncomfortably for the claimant, which one would have thought he might have foreseen.
But whether my books are mine or not, still whenever one of them appears the same thing happens. I am pressed to own that such-and-such a character ”is taken from So-and-so.” I have not yet yielded to these exhortations to confession, partly, no doubt, because it would be very awkward for me afterwards if I owned that thirty different persons were the one and only original of ”So-and-so.”
My character for uprightness (if I ever had one) has never survived my tacit, or in some cases emphatic, refusal to be squeezed through the ”clefts of confession.”
It is perhaps impossible for those who do not write fiction to form any conception how easily an erroneous idea gains credence that some one has been ”put in a book”; or, if the idea has once been entertained, how impossible it is to eradicate it.
Looking back over a string of incidents of this kind in my own personal experience, covering the last five-and-twenty years, I feel doubtful whether I shall be believed if I instance some of them. They seem now, after the lapse of years, frankly incredible, and yet they were real enough to give me not a little pain at the time. It is the fas.h.i.+on nowadays, if one says anything about oneself, to preface it by the pontifical remark that what one writes is penned for the sake of others, to save them, to cheer them, etc., etc. This, of course, now I come to think of it, must be my reason also for my lapse into autobiography. I see now that I only do it out of tenderness for the next generation.
Therefore, young writers of the future, now on the playing-fields of Eton, take notice that my heart yearns over you. If, later on, you are harrowed as I have been harrowed, remember
_J'ai pa.s.se par la._
Observe the prints of my goloshes on the steep ascent, and take courage.
And if you are perturbed, as I have been perturbed, let me whisper to you the exhortation of the bankrupt to the terrestrial globe:
Never _you_ mind. Roll on.
When I first took a pen into my youthful hand, I lived in a very secluded part of the Midlands, and perhaps, my little world being what it was, it was inevitable that the originals of my characters, especially the tiresome ones, should be immediately identified with the kindly neighbours within a five-mile radius of my paternal Rectory. Five miles was about the utmost our little pony could do. It was therefore obviously impossible that I could be acquainted with any one beyond that distance. And from first to last, from that day to this, no one leading a secluded life has been so fatuous as to believe that my characters were evolved out of my inner consciousness. ”After all, you must own you took them from _some one_,” is a phrase which has long lost its novelty for me. I remember even now my shocked astonishment when a furious neighbour walked up to me and said, ”We all recognised Mrs. Alwynn at once as Mrs. ----, _and we all say it is not in the least like her_.”
It was not, indeed. There was no shadow of resemblance. Did Mrs. ----, who had been so kind to me from a child, ever hear that report, I wonder? It gave me many a miserable hour, just when I was expanding in the suns.h.i.+ne of my first favourable reviews.
When I was still quite a beginner, Mrs. Clifford published her beautiful and touching book, ”Aunt Anne.”
There was, I am willing to believe--it is my duty to believe _something_--a faint resemblance between her ”Aunt Anne” and an old great-aunt of mine, ”Aunt Anna Maria,” long since dead, whom I had only seen once or twice when I was a small child.
The fact that I could not have known my departed relation did not prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out over me.
In my whilom ignorance, in my lamblike innocence of the darker side of human nature, I actually thought that a disclaimer would settle the matter.
When has a disclaimer ever been of any use? When has it ever achieved anything except to add untruthfulness to my other crimes? Why have I ever written one, after that first disastrous essay, in which I civilly pointed out that not I, but Mrs. Clifford, the well-known writer, was the author of ”Aunt Anne?”
They replied at once to say that this was untrue, because I, and I alone, _could_ have written it.
I showed my father the letter.
The two infuriated ladies were attached to my father, and had known him for many years as a clergyman and a rural dean of unblemished character.
He wrote to them himself to a.s.sure them that they had made a mistake, that I was not the author of the obnoxious work.
But the only effect his letter had on their minds was a pained uprootal of their respect and long affection for him. And they both died some years later, and (presumably) went up to heaven, convinced of my guilt, in spite of the unscrupulous parental ruridiaconal effort to whitewash me.
Long afterwards I mentioned this incident to Mrs. Clifford, but it did not cause her surprise. She had had her own experiences. She told me that when ”Aunt Anne” appeared, she had many letters from persons with whom she was unacquainted, reproaching her for having portrayed their aunt.